by Thinus Ferreira
Ebi Atawodi, Uber Nigeria's former general manager for the West African region, has been appointed by Netflix as director of payments for Netflix's Africa, Europe and Middle East (EMEA) region, a region that currently has 66.7 million subscribers.
Announcing her appointment as Netflix EMEA director of payments on LinkedIn, Ebi Atawodi wrote that "Anyone who knows me knows I'm obsessed with Netflix – the culture, the product, the impact it has had on the art of storytelling. Excited to be joining Netflix as director of payments [Europe, the Middle East and Africa] and can't wait to do the 'best work of my life' ".
In her new role, Ebi Atawodi will work to streamline, adapt and integrate Netflix's payment system not just for consumers in South Africa and across the African market, but she will likely also work with telecom and pay-TV partners like Telkom and MultiChoice who have already integrated the video streaming service as an add-on app that their customers can sign up for besides the main services.
Ebi Atawodi joins notable other Africans working for and representing Netflix's interests in Africa, including Dorothy Ghettuba as the programming head of Netflix Originals for Africa, Ben Amadasun as Netflix's director of licensing and co-productions in Africa, as well as Marang Setshwaelo who is Netflix's publicity director for the sub-Saharan Africa region working from Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
Ebi Atawodi worked for Uber for 6 years, starting in 2014 as Uber's general manager for Lagos where she expanded the availability of the ride-sharing service in around Nigeria's largest cities like Lagos and Abuja, as well as across the West African region, and spearheaded the introduction of cash payments..
She eventually became Uber's general manager for West Africa.
Ebi Atawodi became Uber's product manager for global payments in February 2017 just a year after Netflix launched across Africa in 2016 where it is now competing with MultiChoice's Showmax, Apple TV+, Amazon Prime Video and a growing list of video streamers available on the continent.
Ebi Atawodi jumps to Netflix in Amsterdam from Uber's office in Amsterdam where she was the senior product manager at Uber worldwide, leading the Uber's Amsterdam money product team.
Previously she was the head of corporate communications at Etisalat, one of the main telecommunications companies in Nigeria.
During her career, Ebi Atawodi has worked with various companies such as Nokia, GlaxoSmithKline and First Bank of Nigeria and holds a B.Sc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Nottingham and M.Sc in Computing Science from Imperial College London.
Netflix currently has just under 2 million subscribers in Africa according to the latest market research, ahead of Showmax with 688 000 (including DStv subscribers who get it as a free add-on).
In January 2021 Netflix reached 203.7 million paying subscribers when it surpassed the 200 million subscriber mark for the first time, and noted that it expects the EMEA region with its current 66.7 million subscribers to surpass North America by sometime around 2023 or 2024.
